


Satellites

by glasscaskets



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Bucky Barnes Feels, Cold War, Gen, Minor Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Minor Steve Rogers/Sam Wilson, POV Natasha Romanov, Perestroika, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Red Room, Russia, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 21:44:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6131105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscaskets/pseuds/glasscaskets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the immediate aftermath of SHIELD's collapse and Steve's plunge into the Potomac, Natasha considers her place in the world. Also the fact that Steve is depressing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Satellites

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I'm playing kind of fast and loose with Natasha's age here, but if she was a spy for the actual Soviet Union I've made her about as young as I possibly can.

 

When the Soviet Union dissolved in the winter of 1991, two citizens of the defunct nation floated above the earth in a space station, living in different time and in a vacuum of stars indifferent to the petty deaths of nations down below.

That’s the sort of story Nat suspects Steve would love, if they ever got around to talking about it. She was always thinking of things she should get around to telling Steve. 

The thing is, is Steve is depressing. 

Contrary to the myth she’s had some hand in curating, Natasha has things she remembers before the Red Room, and they’re good. She can remember being in the lap of a woman who smelled like thick brown sugar, a scratchy sweater leaving an imprint on her cheek, a lullaby more felt than heard through that old rawboned chest. She can remember her own legs, short and plump, in white stockings and black boots, tucked over the shoulders of a man who held her ankles in place, and laughed when she knocked snow off the tree branches into his hair. She can remember someone buttoning her collar and wanting to run clean across a rumpled, rocky field. She can remember singing and icons and someone on the radio talking about Polish Solidarity, and even better she can remember nursery rhymes, though not who she sang them with. Perhaps the sweater lady.

She can remember being a lot of people. She doesn’t think Steve knows what that’s like.

What she’s gleaned mostly from their sparse talks about the past and present is that Steve’s walls have walls, and that he was so completely dirt-poor he still doesn’t even know how poor he was. Natasha was born in a Moscow slum and spent her pre-Red Room years chewing rock-hard Soviet bread, and she’d been starved for punishment in the Red Room twice she could remember, gone so long without food her mouth felt like sandpaper and the room swam if she tried to move her head. She’d lived in a dormitory built in 1910 and not renovated since, shared it with more girls at once then were probably supposed to occupy the whole floor. She’d never taken a hot shower until the night Clint talked her into defecting, and she’d been so alarmed by it he’d had to tell her it wasn’t a punishment. She knew what it was to have nothing at all.

But Steve’s eyes bugged out when he learned that even Clint and Bruce, survivors of the shittiest American childhoods he’d heard of, ate meat with any regularity. While Tony acted disgusted at the concept of actually cutting out, purchasing, or consuming a cow’s tongue, which Bruce’s family had done in their leanest years, Steve had grudgingly admitted he could only remember eating meat twice before the army, and both times the good fortune was attributed to church ladies. Steve had also been shocked to learn that even poor people had heat in their apartments these days, and while he’d closed off his face and wellspring of stories when Tony asked if it was a sin, he’d technically knocked Clint out of the running for “most pathetic food story,” trumping Clint’s story of making ramen with toilet water when he admitted to eating glue out of the binding of his mother’s Bible. 

So she could glean that he was poor, that his parents were tetchy subjects—father just “worked,” mother “did her best,” and that was about all she could pull from him—and that the anger in him never really petered out, just waited, embers, for the next fight he could pick with a deserving foe. He reminded her, that way, of Tony, desperate for someone to give him the opportunity to prove he could beat them in a fight. Desperate for someone to wrong him just so he could show exactly how little mercy he had left.

And then, of course, when the god-damned Winter Solider had him backed into a corner and Steve had the chance to fight like the devil he was, to righteously kill this unkillable thing, to win a fair fight, he dangled there like a rag doll and let the ghost who pinned Natasha to a the side of a mountain with a steel Tandem wadcutter slug drop him into the Potomac and fish him back out, presumably out of some kind of twisted pity. 

She didn’t distrust Steve like Tony, but she knew why he did. Steve set his plane in a nosedive straight for the frozen mid-Atlantic and did it without a thought to give his coordinates—hell, in the Red Room they’d used it as a laughing example of how dumb those dog-like Americans were, pushing so relentlessly forward without a thought for how to make it work. Steve jumped without a parachute and never dared to bear any more of his heart than the pieces that chewed on Bible glue.

In Leningrad, during the war, people did eat glue. But they also ate each other, and their pet dogs, and the leather off of shoes. It takes a lot to make a Russian call you pathetic. 

But Sam with his wings had fished Steve off the riverbank, and held Steve’s hand for days in the hospital while news of the collapse of SHIELD poured in, while Steve’s uselessly perfect body ate through sedatives and painkillers too fast to offer him any more than a flutter of relief before his destroyed ribs and shattered pelvis and broken jaw and cheekbone set so determinedly—dumb American dogs, with relentless German engineering to boot—to healing. She watched from a distance as Steve twisted and tried to hold in the pain, as it swallowed him up and he howled around the hot pulse of his jaw forming back into itself, as Sam cupped his hand and told him a thousand times it was almost done, begged the nurse to knock him out, get an elephant tranquilizer, anything. 

A nurse bullied Sam home to shower and nap on the second day, and she waited outside for him that evening.

“You’re good to him,” she said, posing, being Steve’s dragon of an older sister. She knew what Sam wanted, she could tell from the way he smiled at Steve and acted for all the world like she wasn’t braless in a wife-beater next to him, and she thought maybe Steve would like the same things (and wouldn’t that explain his resistance to her dating tips), but she wouldn’t let that leathery heart get punctured by the first thing to smile really big. That was a rookie mistake, and Steve was twenty-three. 

She’d been twenty-three when Clint got her out. It was the last gasp of Perestroika, the news of Gorbachev’s meeting in Malta leaking back to Moscow and bringing with it the death knell of the unbreakable Union, and in the heat of high August with a slow-boiled coup fizzling out and Yeltsin rallying for all he was worth, Agent Barton told her in America they’d forgive anything for information.

Tony, drunk and know-it-all, had once given her shit for the timing of her defection, the question obvious—why not wait for the worst to be over and pick from the scraps? Why jump a sinking ship, says Tony, who’d have stayed abroad to pick distracted passengers’ pockets. 

She’d said primly that nobody knew then what would become of their reconstruction, and truthfully she’d been on the run from something far darker than the communism Yeltsin was a breath from banning. Tony knew that, probably, knew something of the dark spiderwebs she’d perched in, the ugly cables that dangled off the Red Room, Hydra, Ten Rings. The conspiracy theorists were wrong, of course—there was no master puppeteer pulling all the strings, and people do bad things the moment they’re in the dark, twas ever thus—but there was something to be said for the poetry of it all. On the last day of December, 1991, six days after the Hammer and Sickle was lowered over the Kremlin for the very last time, the Winter Solider was sold to Hydra for an undisclosed sum and an in at the UN Security Council. 

“He’s a good guy,” Sam had told her, warier than he’d yet been with her. Nothing bonds people like running for your life. It’s what comes after that’s tricky.

“He’s young,” she’d said, without commentary.

“He’s ninety-four,” said Sam, but she thought he understood.

“Keep playing the music,” she said, “so he won’t think he slept another seventy years.” 

She let Sam past her them, watched him duck into the hospital lobby in the fading dusk. She had court in the morning, and it was weird to think there wouldn’t be tedious SHIELD debrief, punctuated by good coffee from Maria and Clint’s dirty sign language and loud groaning about the pointlessness of SHIELD debriefs for things that had already been on the news.

Sam was probably in love with Steve, maybe in some profound way or maybe the same way she’d been in love with Clint once when they’d had to press themselves to opposite sides of a tunnel to avoid being killed by an oncoming train, and he broke his foot in the process, and in the echoing silence once the train was gone he’d said “ow” and she’d laughed and for a moment felt right where she belonged. She’d held his hand when a then-younger and publicly alive Phil Coulson airlifted them out of there, so maybe she’s a jerk not to call that profound, too. 

The Winter Solider, no longer the property of Hydra and having remained loyal, at least, to one of his handlers—the ex-commanding officer he’d dragged out of the Potomac and left for Sam and Natasha to try to hold together while DC burned and Tony, at Natasha’s fevered request, sent a jet—before taking off into the wind. She knew Steve wanted to find him, but she didn’t think he ever would. Not unless the former Sergeant Barnes decided to come in from the cold.

She hadn’t been aware of the phrase, _to come in from the cold_ , when Clint used it, half joking, in a filthy hotel room a mere eight miles south of the Kremlin where he’d dunked a knife in vodka, said “Please don’t make me regret this,” and sliced a tracking chip she didn’t know she’d had out of her forearm before chucking it artlessly into the street. 

“It’s August,” she’d said, still tricky with English and without a script, and Clint had taken a moment and then burst out laughing. 

“It means _defect_ ,” he had explained to her, and she’d realized, hand and thin, grayish hotel washcloth still clamped over her throbbing arm, that that’s exactly what she’d done. A panic had welled up in her, as relentless and twice as hot as the blood that had followed Clint’s pocket knife, and her vision went white at the edges for a moment as all the weight of her betrayal crashed around her shoulders, clamped hard on the back of her neck.

“Hey, hey,” Clint had said, tucking a finger under her chin, forcing her to look at him. “You’re safe. It’s alright. You’re getting out. It’s okay, Natalia.”

He’d only seen her name written out. He called her _Nat-a-lee-a_.  

“I’m leaving—everything,” she’d said, stupidly, unable to say what she was leaving, the overbearing weight of history pulling her home, the promises she was unraveling with dangerous abandon. “Everything. For—golden streets. Shit. Capitalist American pig-dogs.” 

Clint laughed again, and chucked her chin a bit. “Nothing more American than that, kid,” he said.

He was twenty-five. She was twenty-three. It was hard to believe they were ever that young.

Steve healed, of course. Sam kept holding his hand. Something about the way Steve never chased it or pulled away worried her, made something in her chest tug, and her oldest inner voice chides her for such childish attachments. Steve is not her shy little brother really. He could find his way. 

Still, she knew he’d want to follow his Bucky down what Clint aptly termed the fucked up mad scientist rabbit hole, and she didn’t know how to tell him that people didn’t come out of that what they came in. She’d seen the hardware, and watched the propaganda, and to her enduring shame actually starred in a shit quality propaganda film herself at the age of fourteen, shortly after killing someone for the first time, and her participation in that deeply regrettable enterprise—its title, roughly translated, was _Cool Girls Love their Mother Russia and her Interests!_ —was the one secret she told Clint she’d really, truly, kill him if she told. A hospital bombing, so what. Cool girls loving mother Russia, that’s the line. 

She wonders if Pierce knew about that when he taunted her over airing his dirty laundry. She’d like to think so, because that would be funny, in its way. 

Clint says her humor is broken, but so’s his. At any rate, she skips town to dig up what she can on the Winter Solider, with the last of her SHIELD credentials and a selection from the handful of Red Room secrets she held onto, just in case her back was ever truly at the wall.

She found a disaster of redactions and poor record-keeping, of horrors both familiar and new to her, a careful hacking of a half-serum’d brain to keep memories fuzzy and difficult to recall except those which were immediate: where you go, who you kill. It was a song she knew with new words. 

Although, she thought, it had to be insulting to one of them to make such a comparison. She wasn’t sure to whom. He’d been very brave, she thought, and he’d had something left of his heart to bring Steve out of the water. To compare, she left Clint with a permanent scar on his eyebrow and tried to shoot his kneecaps before he got the business end of a tiny revolver he was ridiculously fond of up against her temple and said he could do what he came here to do, or he could do her a favor. If she’d kicked him into a river then, she’d have left him there. 

But no matter. She fixed Steve a dossier before slinking back to DC to play a doll faced murderer before the kangaroo court in SHIELD’s wake. Tony asked her for drinks after. She said okay, and he raised a glass to lying under oath.

“I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true,” she said, letting their delicate champagne glasses touch all the same.

“Truth gets more relative every year,” said Tony, like he was making a grand joke, and he downed his champagne in one go. 

During this lunch, her Winter Soldier file, slim and needling her, was tucked into her purse; she hadn’t let it out of her sight. Not with the blood still in the water.

“So, where now?” Tony asked, cheery, playing as he always does as if they’d just bumped into one another for a quick bite, and not like he’d come down to DC just to see her, because nasty and maladjusted though Tony Stark may be, he loves to be nasty and maladjusted in the general direction of other people.

“Classified,” she said, and indulged him with a smile. “Why didn’t you find out about Hydra when you decrypted SHIELD’s files in New York?”

Tony gave her a look, searched hopefully over her shoulder for a waiter he could flag down for more booze. He shrugged at last and said, “Because somebody was smarter than me. A little. And my head was scrambled egg after all that. Why didn’t you work out you’d been in Hydra’s pocket for two decades?”

That stung a bit, and she copied Tony and finished her champagne. “They didn’t train us to think hard,” she offered, because Tony loves it when people are frank about fucked up things, and he gifted her smile back to her. 

“You couldn’t stop thinking if you tried,” he told her, admiringly, and she knew he was telling her he’d forgive her this oversight if she’d do the same. So he failed to warn her she was working for a monster; so she dragged him into the same monster’s employ. So they both got played, and used, and they both hated that. It was nice to have someone who understood a little how badly that smarted.

“Hey,” said Tony, “what did the billionaire say to the spy.” 

“I don’t know.” 

“He said, ‘I want some more champagne, cuz shit keep getting weirder.’” 

“That’s a good one.” 

“I know. I thought of it myself.” 

They’d laughed then, briefly but amicably, like old friends, old teammates, and she’d known not all was broken, and not everything broken wouldn’t heal. Steve should have taught her that awhile ago, clutching Sam’s hand on the hospital and learning every beat of _Trouble Man_. She’d been slow on the uptake, then, but like she told him, she only pretended to know everything.

So after a meal with Tony she set out for Arlington, where Sam and Steve were waiting for her, Sam’s stance protective, Steve’s body so massive and open and clashing hard with the stonewall look on his face. She brushes shoulders with Nick as she goes. She’ll never quite forgive him for this, but she’s tested his patience enough herself.

“You should be honored,” she tells Steve and Sam. “That’s about as close as he gets to saying thank you.” 

Sam gives the ghost of a smile. Steve plainly didn’t expect her. “Not going with him?” he asks, nodding after Nick, and she says he isn’t he asks if she’s staying here.

 _Here_ could mean DC, or America, or in his life, or on the radar, or alive.

“I blew all my covers,” she says, instead of answering. “I gotta go figure out a new one.” She doesn’t tell him she’ll probably just head to Clint, spend a few weeks laying impossibly low and blowing through all the nice weed he got her for Christmas, keeping feelers out for Nick and for Hydra’s ghosts, making some money with a quick kill or two, waiting for Maria to lure her home. It’s a familiar pattern, but Steve is a baby.

“That might take awhile,” he says, now, and she wonders how much he believes when she pretends she’s ten steps ahead of him and everyone else and herself. The fact that he might seems oddly sweet right now.

“I’m counting on it,” she says, and thinks of Clint and a long bath and rural rooftop and some weed and _Serial_. “That thing you asked me for, I called in a few favors from Kiev.” Nick’s ears are never off, and she changes the city that houses most of her remaining favors with ease. The favor in question was in Dnipropetrovsk, and took her first to Brno and then to Moscow by way of Kharkiv, but what Nick didn’t know wouldn’t kill him, and Kiev was a lovely city. And nobody needed to know how far she could chase a lead for a few good men who might just deserve it. So she pressed the dossier into Steve’s hands, and tells him to call the nurse, who she swears up and down she truly didn’t know was Agent 13.

“She’s not a nurse,” says Steve, tiredly. 

“And you’re not a SHIELD agent,” she tosses back, because he needed that, she can tell. Complacency kills him. He needs to be on the move. 

“What was her name again?” Steve asks, humoring her, and Sam is at his back, and she thinks back to their hands intertwined on the hospital bed, for hours and days, so easy in a way she’d forgotten about, finding one another with a simplicity she’d forgotten people had. People she knew. And _liked_ , even. 

“Sharon. She’s nice.” Maybe she is, and maybe she isn’t. Steve will follow the scent of blood long before he chases skirt, and he’s sweet enough to believe her when she poses like she’s got everything under control, so she closes the distance between them and kisses his cheek. She’s surprised he lets her, and even more surprised that it’s infinitely warmer than the kiss she gave him on the escalator. He smiles at her, just a little but he means it, dumb American dog, the Winter Solider’s file cradled in his hands like she’s handed him a love note.

She’s almost made it out of earshot when that stupid smile gets to her, and she turns and says be careful.

“Steve. You might not want to pull that thread.” 

She knows he’ll never listen, knows that thread is the last thing that tethers him home, far more authentically than it is the same thing for her, and he deserves to pull it and he probably doesn’t what will come tumbling down. She hopes the remains of a boy called Bucky Barnes might stick to the Soldier’s bones; she hopes Steve stops letting a man with a metal arm beat him half to death. 

Sergei Krikalev and Alexander Volkov were the two men in the Russian space station poised above this tiny marble home when their home country lapsed out of being. In an age of gods and monsters, a thing like that shouldn’t hang so heavy off Natasha’s heart, but when they landed in Kazakhstan in 1992, she’d been halfway across the world, honing her American accent and learning not to weep when regimes fell. As they stepped off of their craft, Krikalev and Volkov surrendered the title they’d dragged across the stars, as the last citizens of the Soviet Union, and Clint had asked if that made her sad. She’d said sad was for children, and he said that was where she was wrong.

Weren’t they children then, and wasn’t the world. She turned at the cemetery gate and saw Sam and Steve shoulder to shoulder, heads ducked together, both so willing to walk into the fire. To think that after her world unraveled in her own mind and all around her, and nothing proved real but what she could and couldn’t do with her own hands, and after the last two men to call her country home stepped out of the stars, there were still things left to surprise her. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Sergei Krikalev and Alexander Volkov, and their slightly extended tenure as Soviet citizens, are very real. They launched into orbit as Soviets and landed back on earth as Russians.


End file.
